The Internet-of-Things Meets Business Process Management: Mutual Benefits and Challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the
Internet. These things can be artificial or natural, and interact as autonomous agents forming a complex system.
In turn, Business Process Management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute,
monitor and evolve collaborative business processes within and across organizations. While the IoT and BPM
have been regarded as separate topics in research and practice, we strongly believe that the management of IoT
applications will strongly benefit from BPM concepts, methods and technologies on the one hand; on the other
one, the IoT poses challenges that will require enhancements and extensions of the current state-of-the-art in
the BPM field. In this paper, we question to what extent these two paradigms can be combined and we discuss
the emerging challenges.